Brown has been one of the most consistently available pigment colours throughout human history, produced from earth and organic sources across essentially every culture and period, and has carried both humble and luxurious associations depending on context.
No single HEX value defines this entire colour family — see individual colour profiles below for specific shades.
Umber and sienna, natural earth pigments named for the Italian regions historically associated with their production, are among the oldest and most widely used brown pigments in painting.
Italy
Brown has historically carried humble, everyday associations in much Western fashion (undyed wool, rough working clothing) while also appearing as a luxury colour in fine leather and dark polished wood furniture.
General
Brown has seen a documented resurgence in interior design and fashion in the 2020s as a sophisticated alternative to grey and black neutrals, often paired with warm metals like brass.
2020s
Brown pigments are the least exotic in the paintbox. Umber is a sedimentary earth holding manganese oxides and hydroxides with a larger proportion of iron oxides, and has been known since antiquity; other browns are organic matter dug from peat and brown coal. Because the material was ordinary, the vocabulary did the differentiating, and it borrowed from whatever brown thing was to hand: a coarse cloth, tanned hide, a chestnut, a cuttlefish. The basic word is old but was vague. Old English brun meant dark or dusky, and could even mean shining, and it settled into a definite colour sense only from the 13th century. 1, 2, 3
| Name | Kind | Period | What is known | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Umber | Pigment | antiquity onward; the English word from the 1560s | Named either from the Latin for shadow or from Umbria. 'Burnt umber', a redder prepared form, is attested by the 1640s. | 1, 3 |
| Vandyke brown | Pigment | identified in 17th-century painting | An organic brown from peat, brown coal or soil. Older references to it are confused about what the name covers. | 2 |
| Asphalt | Pigment | said to go back to prehistory | Often mentioned in writing on painting, but hard to detect: only two identifications in actual paintings have been published. | 4 |
| Russet | Cloth | mid-13th century | A coarse woollen cloth, usually a subdued reddish-brown. The name stuck even when the cloth was brown or grey, and by the 1580s it stood for rustic plainness. | 3 |
| Sepia | Pigment | the English word from 1815 | A brown paint or ink prepared from the secretion of the cuttlefish, whose Italian name it carries. | 3 |
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13th century | England | 'Brown' develops a definite colour sense out of an older meaning of dark or dusky. | 3 |
| Mid-14th century | England | 'Tawny' is recorded, from an Anglo-French word for the brownish-yellow of tanned leather. | 3 |
| 16th century | England | 'Auburn', which had meant whitish or flaxen, shifts to reddish-brown under the influence of the word 'brown' itself. | 3 |
| 1641 | — | Rembrandt painted the green-brown background of Saskia as Flora with Vandyke brown, yellow ochre, bone black and lead white. | 2 |
| 1791 | England | 'Maroon' appears for a very dark red or crimson, from the French for the large sweet chestnut. | 3 |
Claim: Old paintings are brown because painters used so much bitumen.
Evidence: Weakly supported. Asphalt is frequently mentioned in the literature, but the pigment is difficult to identify, and ColourLex records only two published cases in which it has actually been found in a painting. The claim may be true of particular pictures; as a general explanation it rests on reputation more than on analysis. 4